Iowa City's Free Gen Writing Workshop

Co-sponsored by PorchLight and Iowa City Poetry, the Free Generative Writing Workshops provide a space for career writers, curious beginners, writers of all income levels and stages of life. Our goal is to make it easy to meet and learn from some of the most talented writer/teachers living in or passing through Iowa City. Every month a new writer leads a generative workshop, presenting a prompt inspired by their own preoccupations, passions, or interests. It has been an adventure, and we are continually inspired by the creative concentration of participants, and the powerful beginnings the workshop generates.

This month's leader: Sanjna N. Singh came to the U.S.  for college, graduating from Bryn Mawr with degrees in Political Science and French. She studied cinema and photography in Paris and subsequently worked for five years at HBO in New York. Her independent documentary “Out of Status” was nominated for the Amnesty DOEN award for Human Rights and aired on Channel 4, UK.

Sanjna has worked on shows like Storm Chasers and Dual Survival for the Discovery Channel, Mob Wives for Vh1, Hotel Impossible for the Travel Channel, Be Good Johnny Weir for Logo, and many others. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Guardian, Guernica, Bitch, Tricycle and other magazines and she was awarded numerous grants and residencies including an award from the Speculative Literature foundation for fiction in 2021. Sanjna recently graduated with her MFA from the University of Iowa’s celebrated Nonfiction Writing Program where she was also a screenwriting fellow. She divides her time between Iowa and India, lives with a needy houseplant and will pet big dogs on the street.